Five Ways Concur Request Simplifies Pre-Purchase Request and Approval
Imagine having insights into future spend commitments across the entire organisation. With this information, you’d be better equipped to maintain healthy cashflow and plan spend more effectively.
But the ability to see and control spend before it’s spent is a dream for many finance leaders. Maybe you assume that being able to see spend in near real-time – as with Concur Expense, Concur Travel, and Concur Invoice – is as good as it gets. Maybe you’ve tried to implement pre-purchase request and approval processes in the past but found they didn’t work in practice because they were too cumbersome or inflexible to achieve widespread adoption.
With Concur Request, the ability to see and control spend before it’s spent becomes reality. It’s a cloud-based solution so all employees can access it remotely, on-the-go, or in the office. It’s part of the SAP Concur product suite, so it’s straightforward to integrate into your current solution. And perhaps most importantly, it’s intuitive and flexible so it works without slowing the organisation down.
It gives finance leaders the visibility into spend commitments across the entire organisation they need. Budget holders get a flexible, streamlined workflow that lets them review proposed spend to check it’s within budget and meets business objectives and compliance policies. It’s good for spend requestors too because they can use intuitive technology to get spend requested and approved quickly.
Read on for a few of the highlights of the research findings.
The Strategic Priorities
For UK executives, there are three key strategic priorities:
To give you an insight into its capabilities, here are five ways you can tailor it to suit your requirements.
Auto-Approve Workflow Steps
Concur Request has a Passive Approval Request feature. This allows auto-approval of all workflow steps when a set number of days or hours before the approval time limit. This is a useful feature, for example, when an employee needs to make last minute travel plans. It means they can book the trip and know it won’t be cancelled because it wasn’t approved in time.
Automatic Approval of Standard Expenses
The Expected Expenses feature streamlines pre-request and approval for standard expenses such as taxis and meals. With this feature enabled, expenses that meet all the set criteria can be automatically approved so they don’t take up approvers’ time.
Mandate Booking Procedure
Using Concur Request you can decide which types of trip can be self-booked by the user and which must be booked via your travel management company (TMC). You can enforce booking procedures based on criteria such as place of departure/arrival, itinerary type, segment type, and more. You can also combine this feature with the Enforce Online/Offline Policy site setting that sends the user to Concur Travel to book a trip.
Request Cancellation
Sometimes, spend needs to be cancelled. The Cancellation Request feature allows users to cancel their request. Cancelled requests can still be attached to an expense report if needed. If the request was made in Concur Travel, the trip is automatically cancelled if the ticket hasn’t been issued yet and if the booking was not an instant purchase. If the booking was made offline, cancelling the request triggers a notification to the TMC (if configured) for the “agency-booked” segments.
Re-Open a Closed Request
To provide a complete audit trail, users attach details of their approved request to their expense report in Concur Expense. Once this has been done, they close their request, which removes it from their dashboard and archives it. Sometimes, a user will close a request by mistake before they have attached it to the relevant expense report. If this happens, the Re-Open a Closed Request feature allows an administrator to re-open the request so the user can attach it.
Find Out More About Concur Request
If you are an SAP Concur customer, schedule a conversation with your SAP Concur Client Success Executive today to how Concur Request could help your organisation see and control spend before it happens. Alternatively, you can book a bespoke demo.